Study describes the scope and integration of music therapy program inside UH medical centers

A brand new study from University Hospitals (UH) Connor Whole Health describes the scope and integration of their music therapy program within10 UH medical centers. The study, entitled “Effectiveness of Medical Music Therapy Practice: Integrative Research using the Electronic Health Record (EMMPIRE): Rationale, Design, and Population Characteristics” is the most important such observational study of medical music therapy practice thus far. Unlike other music therapy programs, which could also be limited to specific hospital units, this system at UH Connor Whole Health is integrated throughout the UH health system, serving patients on general medical/surgical, intensive care, and specialized oncology units, in addition to more restricted environments akin to the stem cell transplant unit and specialized COVID-19 units in 2020. Inside these units, music therapists collaborate with the medical team to handle the needs of patients with various medical conditions, essentially the most common being mental health (39.4%), cardiovascular (11.8%), respiratory (9.9%), and musculoskeletal (8.9%) conditions as reported within the study. The findings from this study were recently published in Journal of Integrative and Complementary Medicine, a number one journal specializing in evaluating the impact of modalities akin to music therapy and their integration inside medical care.

On this retrospective study conducted between January 2017 and July 2020, researchers from UH Connor Whole Health examined the delivery and integration of music therapy across the UH health system and described the demographic and clinical characteristics of all hospitalized adults seen by the music therapy program outside of inpatient psychiatric or emergency departments. Overall, this massive study examined 14,261 music therapy sessions provided to 7,378 unique patients who had been referred by 1,169 healthcare professionals inside 10 UH medical centers over 3.5 years. This study builds upon a 30-year history of seminal music therapy studies at UH funded by the Kulas Foundation, the country’s leading private foundation for funding scientific research in music therapy. Kulas has funded studies at UH studying the efficacy of music therapy in palliative care, surgery, and sickle cell disease. The findings from the present study function the inspiration for the EMMPIRE study led by researchers at UH Connor Whole Health. Other recent publications from the EMMPIRE dataset support the real-world clinical effectiveness of music therapy for addressing patients’ symptoms inside community hospitals and at an instructional cancer center.

“Along with the scale of the EMMPIRE dataset, this descriptive study can also be novel in that it demonstrates our ability to make use of the electronic health record as a research tool. We also compared the characteristics of the population seen by music therapy to the UH population overall to display the combination of the music therapy program,” said Samuel Rodgers-Melnick, MPH, MT-BC, co-investigator for EMMPIRE and the lead creator of the study.

To facilitate a comparison of the music therapy population with hospitalization trends reported by UH, the researchers separated the population into patients seen inside Cuyahoga County hospitals (six mostly urban hospitals including the tutorial medical center in Cleveland) and patients seen in counties outside Cuyahoga County (4 hospitals serving mostly rural areas). This evaluation revealed similarities in demographic and clinical characteristics. For instance, the proportion of patients seen by music therapy who identified as Black/African American inside Cuyahoga County (48.0%) was reflective of the demographics of that county, where 48.3% of Cleveland (the most important city inside Cuyahoga County) residents discover as Black/African American. Moreover, the distribution of medical populations seen by the music therapy team (i.e., cardiovascular, respiratory, and musculoskeletal) were much like the rates reported by UH inside and outdoors Cuyahoga County..

“Music therapy services are embedded across the UH healthcare system and integrated into frontline interdisciplinary teams caring for critically ailing patients. We’re committed to providing non-pharmacologic support to patients from diverse backgrounds for each physical and psychological vulnerabilities.” said Seneca Block, The Lauren Wealthy Wonderful Endowed Director of Expressive Therapies at UH Connor Whole Health and co-author of the study. UH Connor Whole Health manages the most important health system-based music therapy program within the US with 11 board-certified music therapists who collaborate with providers across the system to assist patients and their families manage the physical and emotional toll of an illness or hospitalization. Moreover, UH Connor Whole Health provides a various offering of integrative health and medicine modalities, including acupuncture, chiropractic, and integrative medicine consults, which can be centered on patients’ entire well-being.

Other essential descriptive findings from the study include: (1) patients seen by music therapy were predominantly female (63.7%), White (54.3%) or Black/African American (44.0%), 63.7 ± 18.5 years of age at admission, and insured under Medicare (51.1%), Medicaid (18.1%) or private insurance (14.2%); (2) patients were referred by physicians (34.7%), nurses (29.4%), or advanced practice providers (24.7%) for coping (32.0%), anxiety reduction (20.4%), or pain management (10.1%); and (3) 39.4% of patients’ hospital admissions included a mental health diagnosis, a significantly higher rate than the common of 27.8% reported amongst all 2016 inpatient stays in the US. “The strength of EMMPIRE and other real-world studies is the reliable documentation within the electronic health record by the integrative health and medicine providers on these interventions and patient-reported outcomes,” said Jeffery A. Dusek PhD, Director of Research, UH Connor Whole Health and Principal Investigator of EMMPIRE in addition to the BraveNet Practice-Based Research Network, the most important such network of integrative health and medicine centers on the earth.